Over $220 million worth of bitcoins have moved from blocks mined during the so-called Satoshi-era, in which the flagship cryptocurrency’s pseudonymous creator was still active in the community, over the last 10 months.
The coins have all been moved from previously unspent block rewards from a miner that was active at that time. Satoshi Nakamoto was publicly active in the community up until December 2010, when they mysteriously disappeared.
According to Bitcoin.com, the movements were spotted with the help of several monitoring tools. The dormant BTC block rewards were moved consolidate at an address with 1,000 BTC in it, before being split through several spends to other addresses.
The mysterious miner also spent the BCH airdropped to the addresses at the time of the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, but did not spend the corresponding Bitcoin SV from the time of the Bitcoin Cash hard fork that created BSV.
Bitcoin.com has quoted blockchain research Issak Shvarts as saying some of the funds “are now owned by the crypto exchange Coinbase,” which would imply the early bitcoin miner is now selling his funds.
It’s believed one single entity is behind the movements, as these followed a similar pattern over the last 10 months. CryptoGlobe reported on the Satoshi-era bitcoin movements on more than one occasion as they have been slowly moving.
In total, the entity has moved over 7,000 bitcoins over the last 10 months. While it’s unclear where most of the funds were moved to, 9.99 BTC, were donated to the Free Software Foundation (FSF), while another 9.,99 went to the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).
It’s often estimated that coins that have been inactive for so long may have been lost forever, as users may have lost the private keys to addresses controlling them. These movements appear to show that some are just holding onto their coins.
It’s unclear how many coins are being held and how many were lost. Earlier this month on-chain analytics firm Glassnode revealed that 1.78 million BTC never left their miner address and that 94% of those funds have been dormant for a decade.
Featured image via Pixabay.
